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Lou Ye in Paris

November 2, 2011

The Chinese director Lou Ye—who was banned from filmmaking for five years due to his representation of the Tiananmen massacre in his 2006 film “Summer Palace” (which I’ve written about on several occasions and discussed in this clip) and who, nonetheless, clandestinely made the film “Spring Fever”—went to Paris to make a film, “Love and Bruises,” which opened there today. I haven’t seen it; reviews in Le Monde and Libération explain that it’s about a Chinese student in Paris (Corinne Yam) who gets involved with a manual laborer (played by Tahar Rahim, best known for “A Prophet”) whose best friend, a petty criminal (Jalil Lespert) exerts a troubling influence on the couple.

The overall question: what happens to a filmmaker’s work when he or she goes to film in another country? It’s of particular concern when the filmmaker’s key subject is his country’s politics—but it’s noteworthy that half of “Summer Palace” takes place in Europe and also has as much to say about European politics as about those of China. Abbas Kiarostami is now filming outside Iran, in order to elude the regime’s pressure on filmmakers; his film “Certified Copy,” set in Italy, is both about the way things are in Italy and about the way they aren’t in Iran. The same is so of the South Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s “Night and Day,” which he made in Paris (not due to any political pressure) and which is about the cultural contrast of where he’s from and where he was filming. And the Chinese director Jia Zhangke made a remarkable documentary, “Dong,” about the artist whose work is featured in his film “Still Life”; half of “Dong” takes place in Bangkok, and the images Jia films there have a feel that’s utterly different from his work in China—they seem relaxed, casual, as if he were filming without fear and without pressure. Which is to say: with the best of filmmakers, there’s no difference in artistic quality and depth of thought; what may differ is the quality and nature of the response their work gets. A political filmmaker doesn’t stop being political, a symbolic filmmaker doesn’t stop being symbolic the day he or she crosses the border.

The other question is: can Lou Ye return to China? (Does he want to return? Is he there now?) It’s a question of some pressing interest, given—as Evan Osnos has reported here—the government’s intensified repression of dissent (and, last week, China even further tightened its censorship).